choices | You Are Here

If clichés are any indication of reality, Americans have exactly two options on Sunday mornings:

1. Stay in bed as long as you want, then put on yoga pants and a hoodie and relax for hours with your cat or dog in a sunny spot, sipping coffee while indulging in The New York Times from cover to cover.

2. Get up early and rush to church (with your coffee in a travel mug), to be surrounded by dozens of people who may or may not have anything in common with you beyond your choice of how to spend Sunday mornings.

For almost my entire adult life, I have willingly gone for that second option. If the first option can be characterized as Blissful Solitude, the one I choose is Awkward Togetherness—at least at the churches I seem to gravitate toward.

There’s no telling what might happen on any given Sunday morning at my church. Drinks are spilled (well, coffee or communion juice), squealing toddlers are chased, and people are generally loud at the wrong moments. It’s like a family reunion with all your crazy relatives. Every Sunday.

I am clearly a glutton for punishment, as I head back to church week after week. But I make that choice because I am also a glutton for unexpected friendships, undeserved grace, and unconventional beauty. These are things I can’t seem to find anywhere else in the world, so each Sunday I return to church for more.

In no other realm of my life could I spend a couple of hours with such a diverse collection of people: a leading advocate for disability rights and a leading scholar of Islam; ex-convicts and an ex-prison guard; an Obstetrics nurse and newborns; homeless people and psychologists; a once-big-time blues drummer with a grey beard down to his belt, his teenage drum student, and a toddler who idolizes them both.

Church is the place I go to be in community—not with the mainstream, middleclass, upstanding Christian crowd, but with the ones Jesus gravitated toward: the misfits, the broken, and all those who don’t always “fit.”

Many Sunday mornings, as any illusion of well-rehearsed order dissolves, I sit in church half-cringing, seeing all the chaos and mishaps through the eyes of some poor visitor who wandered in to see what we’re all about. Being in this place can be so uncomfortable and awkward, especially for those of us adept at feigning full command of ourselves and our surroundings.

But those feelings have a way of projecting back onto me, highlighting my own brokenness and discomfort in this world. Before long—during the very same worship service, even in the next breath!—my cringe transforms into a heart swell of openness and love-beyond-reason. I look around our coffee-stained sanctuary and see the stories we live together.

There is our friend who one day surprised us by returning from a visit home to India with a new bride at his side. Now they have a baby we ooh and ahh over at every opportunity.

Down the row from them is the former blues drummer. For years he spent Sunday mornings sitting behind the drum set with the worship band; now he’s recovering from cancer surgery and too weak to play a whole set. But that doesn’t stop him from pulling a tambourine out of his bag when the spirit moves him, and making music from his seat.

I watch a preschooler run up to her grandparents with smiles and hugs. As an infant, she was raised by her grandparents. Now she and her sister are the adopted children of a young couple in the church (and vessels of joy for everyone who knows them).

On the other side of the sanctuary is the woman who is always busy sewing or crocheting away on a blanket for someone’s baby, and there is the woman who regularly testifies to how Jesus has delivered her from debilitating anxiety. Behind me a hearing aid whines briefly as our “senior member,” at 90, makes an adjustment.

Then a song from the church’s “hippie days” begins, having made its way into a worship set. It is unfamiliar to me, but clearly not to everyone. A man gets off his chair and kneels right there on the carpet, while a few of the “old-timers” begin doing hand motions that seem part-sign language, part-jazz hands. A baby screeches, and we know exactly who it is, without turning our heads. A boy with autism rocks and rocks and rocks in a rocking chair in the back of the sanctuary. That is how he does church.

And I bow my head, overwhelmed by the terrifying-yet-glorious goodness of being awkward together in the presence of God.

From the beginning, there were no illusions of my culinary domesticity. We met, he cooked, and I fell in love.

At the time, I was working in campus ministry, which meant: one, I was not wealthy, but two, I had a generous expense account. With it, I took students out for dinner and ate lovely balanced meals. I always ordered meat, because restaurant meat was the only animal protein I was getting at the time. I always ordered fresh vegetables, because vegetables are expensive when they don’t come in a can.

At home, I ate things from cans. And Zatarain’s. Lots of Zatarain’s.

There is no shame in eating red beans and rice from a box. And my to-be husband was happy to cook. He loves to cook, and most people love to eat what he cooks. I was content to do the shopping and dishes, and to set the table with candles and cloth napkins.

I’m not completely undomesticated.

Our system worked well until children came into the picture. For a variety of reasons, and against both of our good judgments, I became a mostly stay-at-home mom, though I tried to be not-at-home as much as possible.

I spent a lot of time pushing strollers around museums, frequented the library, and mapped the location of every bathroom at the zoo. I leaned up against piles of laundry and read theology during naptime. I planned playdates with people I liked, and refused to give up coffeeshops.

This was my survival strategy, and everything (apart from diapers, inexplicable crying and constant fatigue) was fine and dandy. Until about five-thirty.

“Honey, I’m home!”

And almost every day, when my husband walked through the front door, I experienced two emotions simultaneously. One was relief, “Oh-thank-you-Jesus-it’s-another-grown-up,” and the other, a daily dose of magnified guilt about dinner. It felt like June Cleaver was slapping me across the face with her perfectly manicured hand. Dinner. He had just worked all day long, and I was at the museum, and now I expected him to make dinner.

Housewife fail.

Now, nevermind that my husband likes to cook and that it helps him unwind from the day (I do not understand this, but he swears that it is true). Nevermind that it gives him a free pass from kid responsibility for another hour. Nevermind that he whips up amazing meals from random things he finds in the fridge, and I can cook spaghetti into the shape of a ball. “Excuses, excuses,” scolds the well-pressed superwoman in my head, “what kind of wife and mother are you?”

In my better moments, I am astounded that I give this scolding superwoman the time of day. It’s 2015 for goodness sake, and set gender roles have shifted, at least in part. My husband likes to cook, and he’s good at it. This is his role in our family, and he accepts it. So why do I experience this nagging pressure? What’s next? Am I going to start questioning my right to vote?

But all of this is more complicated than a caricature.

I have these female friends, and they are not caricatures. They are accomplished, dynamic women, and I have a lot of respect for them. A few years ago they started doing things like family meal planning, and as far as I can tell, family meal planning involves not only planning (which is bad enough) but also cooking(!) from scratch(!!). They bookmark food blogs, research chef knives, and collect healthy recipes on Pintrest. They make brownies with hidden spinach. They buy Brussels sprouts at the Farmer’s Market and prepare them in a way that their kids will eat.

Imagine.

And they don’t do all of this as superwomen, or because they are trying to squeeze themselves into some predetermined role. They care about nutrition, and they care about their families. And so they are working on new habits, in fits and starts, according to their schedules and situations.

And because I know my friends, I can’t dismiss them as I would a caricature of a “fifties housewife,” just as I can’t hide behind my caricature of a “liberated woman” or even “hopeless cook.” My husband is our family’s 9-5 worker in this season of our lives, and we need to eat, and eat well.

Maybe there is a part I can play.

I’m not saying anything revolutionary here, just that I’d like to take meal preparation a bit more seriously. I’d like to explore a role that I have largely rejected-not because I have to, but because it would be beneficial for the people I love. I won’t do all the cooking (oh perish the thought), but I could do more, and I’m sure that it won’t be a complete disaster.

Maybe I’ll begin with a big pot of homemade beans and rice. I don’t want my daughters to think that only men can cook.

Photo by Peter Grevstad

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Tag Archives: choices

Called to be awkward together

My Life as a Failed Fifties Housewife